Patriot Politics

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One thing about Obama crony Valerie Jarrett:  in the fine tradition of community organizers everywhere, she is about getting things done!

Wondering who is responsible for quality appointments in the Obama Administration such as Van Jones, Mark Lloyd and Cass Sunstein?

Clueless as to why Obama would choose to cancel a meeting with the Dalai Lama, suspending a Presidential tradition since 1991?

Curious as to who is in charge of “cultural nuance” (codespeak for white staffers having to “get an issue” right) in the Obama Administration?

Interested in how restrictions against meeting with lobbyists were relaxed so that civil rights organization directors (registered lobbyists) could meet with officials despite Obama’s Executive Order?

Look no further, it’s Our Gal Val.

Valerie Jarrett heads up the shadow cabinet of Obama advisors, working behind the scenes as an alter-ego to both Barack and Michelle.  Lucky for us, Ben Johnson has been hard at work at Front Page Magazine and David Horowitz’s NewsReal Blog to give us the goods on the web of influence surrounding the Obamas.  That web of influence is spun by Valerie Jarrett.

Think you knew all you need to about the 60′s radicalism that is pervasive in this Administration?  Think again.  Realize that Valerie has a patron herself, in Marilyn Katz.  Marilyn tried to get Rod Blagojevich to seat Valerie in Barack’s Senate seat.  Marilyn doesn’t have any regrets about developing “guerilla nails” for use against police at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  This would be another “Friend of Bill.”  Ayers, that is.

But let’s get back to Valerie.  Mapping out her relationships is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.  Breathlessly, the New York Times tells us that Valerie is the “ultimate Obama advisor,” yet, strangely, her influence “leaves few fingerprints.”  Hmmm.  Secretive, much?

Michelle Malkin more accurately assesses Valerie: “Jarrett has a gift for rationalizing the increasing gap between what Obama promised and what he’s delivering.” Michelle further points out that “pay for play corruptocrat” Adolfo Carrion (no pun intended; he’s Latino and brought that vote in for Barack) is under Valerie’s oversight at the White House Office for Urban Affairs, in a summary of Obama Czars in the New York Post.  That would make Val some sort of Supernova Czarina, would it not?

Barack says he doesn’t make a single decision without Valerie.  That’s the reason there’s a “Chicago Sensibility” around D.C. these days.

“We shared a common history in that so many of us did have ties back to City Hall [yep, that would be Val and the Mayor, here] and had relationships that grew out of that experience, and we have grown up in a sense together,” Jarrett told me. “And then to come here together, it would have been much harder without each other.”

We’ll just bet it would, Val.

Attention Shoppers:  Clean up on Paragraph 2:

Today, The Montana Standard launches a new weekly columnist for its editorial page Byron York will serve as a conservative voice every Tuesday, just as Leonard Pitts gives the more liberal view on Mondays.

York, a staunch conservative, presents his arguments in a thoughtful, measured fashion, rather than resorting to cheap personal attacks on President Obama and others in the Democratic Party that seem to be the hallmark of the GOP these days, said Standard Editor Gerry O’Brien.

Previously the White House correspondent for the National Review, and a frequent guest on political talk shows, York is a columnist respected for his reporting skills, fine writing and analytical approach, O’Brien said.

Former President Carter, Maureen Dowd, Keith Olbermann, Jeanene Garofolo, Barbara Boxer, Rachel Maddow, and others, this is Earth calling:  A differing opinion is NOT racism.  And Lindsey?  Nice of you to wake up and smell the coffee. We’ve expected more out of you for a long time.

We’re fond of George Patton in our house.  We like the portrayal George C. Scott made of him, and we think it must have been thrilling to the nation and his colleagues in the military when he blasted through North Africa and Europe.  He’s just the kind of no-b.s. guy you want in a leader: decisive, blunt, quick to act, and then move on to the next task.

We first saw this video a couple of years ago when the anti-war movement was noisy.  The micro-managers in Washington were giving General Petraeus a hard time.  Suddenly Congressional Representatives who couldn’t recall specific briefings decided to cover their backsides by suggesting they’d been lied to and that a forceful surge wouldn’t solve any problems.  Now we’ve got no outside war protesters to speak of – after all,  it was their candidate who won the election.  Protesting his war policy would be loony, wouldn’t it, even though you’re carping about it amongst yourselves.  Besides, why go out of town to protest, unless you’re Cindy Sheehan, when you’ve got Congress to oppose the President’s war policy – such as it is – for you?

“In this time of nuclear weaponry we cannot afford to wait for the fight to come to us!  You need to understand that.  This political correctness stuff is just a bunch of crap!  This generation is so god-dammed spoiled and lazy, it wouldn’t know a real threat to their freedom until it interrupted the power source to their X-box and killed a half a million people. The complacency of fools will destroy them.”

Patton Returns

Cass Sunstein, another Obama czar, is poised to take the helm at the Office of Budget and Management as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  Is that title going to fit on a business card, or is it lifted from a list of acceptable socialist agencies?   We can all be relieved, though, that Cass must be eminently qualified.  He sure is an expert on a lot of stuff:

Cass thinks being an individual is too confusing and “pernicious” for most of us.  Of course the government is in a better position to decide what’s best:

Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust “government intervention” and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions. – Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More Than Ever, Basic Books, New York, 2004, p. 3

Cass doesn’t think our money is ours.  It’s only ours through divine-like distribution achieved with bureaucratic oversight.  Why, it’s only through the benevolence of the government that we have any personal money at all:

“In what sense in the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live?… Without taxes there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public fisc. … There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day …” – Cass R. Sunstein, “Why We Should Celebrate Paying Taxes,” The Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1999

And of course, Cass is the better to decide what you see, hear, and speak, whether it’s on the internet, the radio, or perhaps even at your dinner table:

A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.

–Cass Sunstein, arguing for a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet in his book, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton University Press, 2007), p.137

Cass thinks that unfettered access to the Internet can lead only to what he calls cyberbalkanization – by which groups of like-minded individuals self-restrict into their own private communications echo chambers.  So he wants to make sure everyone gets a balanced look at things by imposing the balance.

Cass wants us to know that

People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself. – from Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

In Nudge, a book he co-authored with Richard Thaler, Wikipedia reports he suggests it is better to attempt positive change by giving the choice of good behavior (nudging) rather than by sanctions against bad behavior.  We’re all toddlers now and the government is our mommy.

It’s getting so that we’ve got to look under the Cabinet’s Aubusson to get to the dirty tier of appointments underneath.

Did you know that Cass Sunstein is married to Samantha Power ?  Yep, that ole Samantha, who thinks Hillary Clinton is a “monster.”  Maybe it takes living with one to know one, eh?

It seems as though there’s a parody of everything set to this marvelous scene from Der Untergang.  The last one we saw was about Brett Favre coming over to the Vikings.  This one, entitled Barack’s Downfall, is better:

It’s not quite 9th month of Barack Obama’s Presidency.  Who is the baby going to look like?

Conservatives have been asking and examining the warning signals of what Obama is planning to birth.  In a whirlwind of activity, with Republicans still reeling from the election loss and in disarray due to leadership changes (lack of leadership whatsoever?), Obama’s Administration and handlers have moved quickly to implement alarming changes, part of a blueprint to radically transform America.

Conservatives and moderates alike are justifiably alarmed at the disregard for due process.  Overwhelming intrusiveness embedded in the health care initiatives and enormous deficit spending to stabilize and bail out the financial services and automobile industries are promoted as necessary for economic recovery and progress.  A groundswell of dissent has arisen, in particular at Tea Party gatherings to protest the inevitability of tax burden inflicted by these programs, and opposition to big government’s intrusion into daily life.

Obama’s careless appointments and associations, with no vetting and inconsistent policy, are on occasion (see: Van Jones) undone when this kind of sunlight shines.  More alarming is the seeming irresponsibility and amateurism associated with the staffing process and the circumvention of congressional approval and oversight on all the “czars.” Add the inconsistencies in foreign policy which, considering the usual suspects who are the messengers, would signal a cover-up or slight of hand, and we’ve got the perfect storm, a sudden and overwhelming tsunami by design.  The frenetic pace set by Obama and his team have everyday Americans pulling hard at the emergency brake.

We know what little we know, but what don’t we know?  The most transparent Administration in history isn’t particularly interested in telling.  Throughout this gestation, some of us have wondered what we’re not seeing or hearing about.  Mainstream media, famous for under-reporting or no reporting of Obama’s behind-the-scenes machinations, appears to be complicit and even overtly championing the Administration.  As such, it’s not only difficult to keep track of what’s going on, but even more difficult to uncover what the Administration might not want you to know.

Into the maelstrom come Nancy Matthis and Austin Davis, with a chilling prediction, but a handy summation of what Obama has wrought in 9 short months:

• Obama quickly removed the census from the Department of Commerce and placed it under Rahm Emanuel in the White House. He appropriated millions to the socialist advocacy group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to man the operation.
• He has appointed 45 czars to date (two have already departed), most unvetted and unconfirmed by Congress. These authoritarians parallel the cabinet functions, which must be vetted by Congress.
• He frightened Congress into passing a ridiculous spending bill, aka stimulus bill, that has plunged the United States into a downward spiral of debt and made us beholden to communist China.
• He nationalized financial institutions.
• He took over automobile companies, restructured their financial operations, and replaced their executives at will.
• The Democrats in Congress introduced legislation for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to begin developing central internment centers within the continental United States.
• The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an official publication profiling returning vets and politcal conservatives, among others, as “terrorists.”
• The military began training a unit for civilian population control.
• The Democrats in Congress moved to control all the water in the United States, every drop of it.
• The Democrats in Congress moved to control all the food in the United States, not only mandating what every farmer may or may not do, but also controlling the seeds.
• Obama is seeking control of the Internet, including the authority to shut it down in time of crisis.
• The Democrats in Congress are currently seeking federal control for delivery of health care in the United States, including creation of a panel of bureaucrats who will decide who gets treated.
• Obama is encouraging American citizens to inform on their friends and neighbors who criticize his health care program to the White House.
• Obama has arrogantly used taxpayer money to pursue partisan objectives.
• The Democrats in Congress are trying to legislate mandatory national service for all young people, which would exclude Christian expression for the duration.
• Obama’s Federal Communications Commission operative, Mark Lloyd, is currently seeking to seize control of radio broadcasts in the United States, with an eye to shutting down conservative talk radio. Lloyd has openly expressed his admiration for Hugo Chavez, who shut down radio stations in Venezuela that expressed dissent about his socialist programs.
• Most recently, Obama bypassed elected school boards and school district superintendents to schedule a speech to all of the country’s school children, and issued lesson plans. This action is a violation of existing law, but if allowed to go unchallenged it establishes a precedent for direct federal control of education content.

If you’re inclined to dismiss each one of these actions or appropriations as innocuous or harmless, remember that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Hat tip:  Debbie Hamilton

Hey, everybody know what fisking is?  It’s really something to have your own personal verb, named after you!  It’s a noun, too.  Robert Fisk is as famous as Kleenex and Xerox!

David Forsmark, of the Newsreal Blog, delivers a yeoman’s fisk of Keith Olbermann‘s latest diatribe against Glenn Beck, exposing it for what it is:  covering fire for Van Jones.  Earth to Olby: Van’s on the curb and the bus is coming.  See:  Jeremiah Wright and Barry’s Grandma.

Wondering . . .

Why there were so many war protests for so long and now there just aren’t any?

How Joe Biden can brag about how well the economy is responding and August jobless numbers are at 9.7% – or over 16% if you add the fudged numbers?  ADP found an additional 80,000 job losses that weren’t included in the 9.7%.  The good news is the government is hiring, and the healthcare industry is, too.  Why don’t we hear about that?

What is an avowed Communist and 9/11 Truther doing as anything in a government administration, let alone Green Czar?  Is Van Brown some kind of Renaissance Guy?

How come our 45 casualties in the Middle East this month went unremarked by the media as the worst.losses.ever?  Cindy Sheehan is still worked up about it, but she’s not camped out in Crawford anymore, is she?

Why conservatives are portrayed as rabid mobs, but liberals are the ones biting fingers off and beating people up?

Why it’s okay for one President to address the nation’s “schoochildren” [sic] with Department of Education talking points, but not another?

Why Gov. Jennifer Granholm thinks the “Michigan Experiment” is a shining example of how government giveaways can create an increase of .25% in jobs and maintain status in the bottom 3 of states most hospitable for new business growth?

Why tort reform isn’t part of an effort to contain healthcare costs?

How come the media can’t get enough of Gov. Mark Sanford, but John Edwards is missing in action?

Here’s somebody else who was wondering about stuff: